last week by Dominik Lettovsky

This is my last week at keeners. i have learned so much and have had so much fun. Every day i have progressed in trying to learn how to do better tricks. Even though I came here without ever having surfed, I have now learned how to do spins and shuvits. In the future if i come again a some tricks that i want to learn to do would be a round house and a blunt. I will probably try these tricks when i get home too! I will take what I have learned to the waves where i live, and I may even try competing in the future. One more thing i would like to complete before i leave keeners would be my double pump. i have gotten close to getting it but i need to get a bigger back stroke to get vertical.it is hard to believe we only have three more days. Tomorrow we are going on a road trip to Montreal. It is going to be a full day road trip starting at 6:30 AM and getting home after 9:30! We are going to one of two waves, we have not decided yet, but we are hoping to go to Habitat 67, which is where I want to go, but we may go to Lachine instead. Either way, both waves look really fun. I hope to come here again next year and learn even more than i already have. Thanks for reading! Dominik

Dominik-swift water rescue training

Hi there this is Dominik. Today we had swift water resque traning. We started the day off with learning how to use our throw bags. i thought throwing the ropes would be easy until I tried it; I kept missing my partner.I later learned that you also need a backup person to hold you down and very good foot placement so you don't fall in when your swimmer grabs the rope. We then went to the death slot  to practice getting over a strainer.

Practicing Boofing over strainer

To get over a strainer in the river such as a fallen tree then you want to slow your self down a little bit and then put your arms in front of you , push up onto the log and simply climb over. We then practiced a rescue for if someone was stuck on a log. The way we did this was we had a total of five people helping. There was one person strapped onto a rope being lowered down the river. two people were holding onto the rope. One person was yelling commands and one helped the person get out of the water onto shore. The person on the rope grabbed the person stuck on the rope and brought him towards shore and then the one person on shore helped them get out. then we practiced foot entrapments and equipment entrapments. Those were much harder to do. We practiced this by being tied onto a rope on a peace of equipment and take it off. this took me many tries to do. the foot entrapment drill we did was you were tied by your foot in the water and you had to find a way to take the pressure off your foot. You do this by swimming to the bottom pushing off the rocks. This one i got first try.

See you next week! Dominik

First Surf- Dominik

surfing at pushbutton

today was my first day ever surfing a wave. I was scared at first and was afraid to fail. I saw other keeners surfing and trying to do tricks that I have never evan heard of but I realised you can fail. My coaches said you will get much more applause if you fail than if you complete your trick so I took there advice and went for it. I had a tough time getting it at first because of every time I got into the wave I flipped. Eventually I got into the wave and surfed for the first time. Evan though it was only for a second or two I was very happy and knew I was hooked on to play boating forever.